Someone else may do a more formal announcement later, but since early registration expires on August 20th, I'm doing a quick heads-up to Less Wrong readers:
The Singularity Summit 2009 is in New York on Oct 3-4.
There are discounts for students, blog mentions, referrals, and registration before August 20th.
Speakers of note to rationalists will include Robin Hanson, Gary Drescher (author of Good and Real, one of the few master-level works of reductionism out there), and David Chalmers. Also speaking will be Marcus Hutter and Juergen Schmidhuber, as well as some of the usual suspects: Aubrey de Grey, Peter Thiel, Ben Goertzel, and Ray Kurzweil.
They're really trying to raise the intellectual level this year.
Singularity Summit 2009 home page, program, and registration.
Even if it was mostly a luxury-for-the-insiders - which I'm not convinced it'd necessarily have to be: the event has lots of big-name participants, and with a bit of advertising, you might get a big crowd of watchers who weren't usually into the Singularity - that doesn't make it worthless or something that doesn't matter. People are emotional creatures, and tend to invest more strongly into things or communities they have an emotional attachment to. Creating a feeling of community around the people following the webcast will help build those emotional bonds.
It's true that some of the audience members might not like being filmed, though. But that has an easy answer: film only the speeches, not the question & answer sessions.
The resources of the organisers are limited, true, and I agree that this isn't anywhere near the number one priority. It's up to them to determine whether or not they have the resources for it - but I do want them to be aware of the potential upsides of a webcast they might not have considered.